The Raven's Call

Pre-Haida 1948-1951

By Dr. Martine Reid, independent scholar, author, curator.

As a young man of 28, Bill Reid was bored working as a radio announcer, so he enrolled in a jewelry course at Ryerson Institute of Technology, in Toronto, thinking he would like to make jewelry like his Haida grandfather, Charles Gladstone.

At Ryerson he learned traditional jewelry making -- a difficult, demanding and ancient craft. He learned that to master the craft he needed mechanical skills, creativity, and the ability to envision objects in three dimensions.

He found inspiration in magazines such as California Arts and Architecture and Craft Horizons, where he looked for examples of modern jewelry and industrial designs from Scandinavia and the United States.

After attending Ryerson for two years, he apprenticed in a platinum and diamond workshop for a year and a half.

During his apprenticeship, Reid learned to build his own workbench, then to craft and sharpen his own tools. He mastered the many techniques needed by a goldsmith, such as soldering, drilling, raising and embossing, chasing and engraving, stretching and thinning, cutting and shaping, filing and bending, chipping and clipping, setting, turning and polishing.

He became skilled in wirework and repoussé. In the repoussé technique, a surface is ornamented with designs in relief hammered out from the back by hand. More importantly, as he developed and strengthened his hand-eye coordination, he learned procedures and processes, solved space and design problems and explored the concept of articulated moving pieces.

In his later years Reid said that he owed his wide range of artistic achievements to the skills that he had acquired from making jewelry. One of the most important of these skills was the mastery of the third dimension: depth.

We don’t have many examples of Reid’s earliest works but we know he produced a number of brooches, based on the human figure, flowers, and marine motifs, such as fish.

Very early on he was interested in carving miniatures. He made a tiny teapot with removable lid, one teacup and a cream jug from a single piece of white chalk and painted them with his mother’s pink nail polish. He presented the tea set in a matchbox to his sister Peggy on her tenth birthday (1932). Bill was twelve years old.

During this early period, Reid worked mostly with silver wire, metal sheets, exotic woods, gold, and semi-precious stones. He made a few gold Victorian-style pieces and textured metal with engraving tools. He did some repoussé work, and experimented with cloisonné -- pieces of coloured enamel separated by strips of flattened wire.

For a time Reid imagined a future as a jeweler like Margaret de Patta, a leader in the American Modernist Jewelry movement. This early sterling brooch was inspired by the Modernists. It is made of square silver wire and has a square-cut ruby floating in the centre.

During this time Reid made regular visits to the Royal Ontario Museum to see the Tanu pole, which had come from his grandmother’s village and which seemed to call him back to the West Coast, to Haida Gwaii, and to his heritage.

The “Bear and Moonstone” Brooch, which Reid made in 1950, was his first “Haida” piece. It is one of his most important pieces and contains ideas that he later developed. The Bear is boldly positioned in profile holding a transparent round moonstone in its paws. The design includes simple abstract Northwest Coast elements, with a face in its centre, but this very early piece has vitality and power – qualities that we encounter in Reid’s later works. It is not static; something is happening.

The brooch was constructed from several pieces, all linked and soldered together. Some of the pieces are engraved with basic Northwest Coast style elements, such as a joint mark on the Bear’s hip, an ovoid-like eye socket in the Bear’s head, and an oval double-line engraving on the torso, thigh, and body component. The shapes of these line engravings clearly show that Reid did not understand formline art yet. This is not surprising, since the pin was made before he set himself out to learn the “conventions” or rules of this form of art.

During this time, as he did throughout his career, Reid studied and experimented. He worked out problems with space, light, and transparency. The brooch was made during his first year at the Ryerson Institute, for his wife while she was pregnant. Was the translucent round moonstone a symbol of the baby? And did he have it in mind 30 years later when he did his pencil drawing of the “Bear Mother” story? In that work, the pregnant “Bear Mother” (with a Bear cub in her womb) is curled with the “Bear Father” in a tender fetal position.

With the “Bear and Moonstone” Brooch, Reid began his journey with Haida art. He combined Northwest Coast icons and designs with the modern jewelry technique of metal-raising to create three-dimensional Northwest Coast jewelry, and he was the first to combine it with a semi-precious stone.